During the eight days I took a daily lesson of an hour and a half. At
the end of this twelve working-hours’ apprenticeship I was graduated—in
the rough. I was pronounced competent to paddle my own bicycle without
outside help. It seems incredible, this celerity of acquirement. It
takes considerably longer than that to learn horseback-riding in the
rough.
Now it is true that I could have learned without a teacher, but it
would have been risky for me, because of my natural clumsiness. The
self-taught man seldom knows anything accurately, and he does not know
a tenth as much as he could have known if he had worked under teachers;
and, besides, he brags, and is the means of fooling other thoughtless
people into going and doing as he himself has done. There are those who
imagine that the unlucky accidents of life—life’s “experiences”—are in
some way useful to us. I wish I could find out how. I never knew one of
them to happen twice. They always change off and swap around and catch
you on your inexperienced side. If personal experience can be worth
anything as an education, it wouldn’t seem likely that you could trip
Methuselah; and yet if that old person could come back here it is more
than likely that one of the first things he would do would be to take
hold of one of these electric wires and tie himself all up in a knot.
Now the surer thing and the wiser thing would be for him to ask
somebody whether it was a good thing to take hold of. But that would
not suit him; he would be one of the self-taught kind that go by
experience; he would want to examine for himself. And he would find,
for his instruction, that the coiled patriarch shuns the electric wire;
and it would be useful to him, too, and would leave his education in
quite a complete and rounded-out condition, till he should come again,
some day, and go to bouncing a dynamite-can around to find out what was
in it.
But we wander from the point. However, get a teacher; it saves much
time and Pond’s Extract.
Before taking final leave of me, my instructor inquired concerning my
physical strength, and I was able to inform him that I hadn’t any. He
said that that was a defect which would make up-hill wheeling pretty
difficult for me at first; but he also said the bicycle would soon
remove it. The contrast between his muscles and mine was quite marked.
He wanted to test mine, so I offered my biceps—which was my best. It
almost made him smile. He said, “It is pulpy, and soft, and yielding,
and rounded; it evades pressure, and glides from under the fingers; in
the dark a body might think it was an oyster in a rag.” Perhaps this
made me look grieved, for he added, briskly: “Oh, that’s all right, you
needn’t worry about that; in a little while you can’t tell it from a
petrified kidney. Just go right along with your practice; you’re all
right.”
Then he left me, and I started out alone to seek adventures. You don’t
really have to seek them—that is nothing but a phrase—they come to you.
I chose a reposeful Sabbath-day sort of a back street which was about
thirty yards wide between the curbstones. I knew it was not wide
enough; still, I thought that by keeping strict watch and wasting no
space unnecessarily I could crowd through.
Of course I had trouble mounting the machine, entirely on my own
responsibility, with no encouraging moral support from the outside, no
sympathetic instructor to say, “Good! now you’re doing well—good
again—don’t hurry—there, now, you’re all right—brace up, go ahead.” In
place of this I had some other support. This was a boy, who was perched
on a gate-post munching a hunk of maple sugar.
He was full of interest and comment. The first time I failed and went
down he said that if he was me he would dress up in pillows, that’s
what he would do. The next time I went down he advised me to go and
learn to ride a tricycle first. The third time I collapsed he said he
didn’t believe I could stay on a horse-car. But the next time I
succeeded, and got clumsily under way in a weaving, tottering,
uncertain fashion, and occupying pretty much all of the street. My slow
and lumbering gait filled the boy to the chin with scorn, and he sung
out, “My, but don’t he rip along!” Then he got down from his post and
loafed along the sidewalk, still observing and occasionally commenting.
Presently he dropped into my wake and followed along behind. A little
girl passed by, balancing a wash-board on her head, and giggled, and
seemed about to make a remark, but the boy said, rebukingly, “Let him
alone, he’s going to a funeral.”
I have been familiar with that street for years, and had always
supposed it was a dead level; but it was not, as the bicycle now
informed me, to my surprise. The bicycle, in the hands of a novice, is
as alert and acute as a spirit-level in the detecting of delicate and
vanishing shades of difference in these matters. It notices a rise
where your untrained eye would not observe that one existed; it notices
any decline which water will run down. I was toiling up a slight rise,
but was not aware of it. It made me tug and pant and perspire; and
still, labor as I might, the machine came almost to a standstill every
little while. At such times the boy would say: “That’s it! take a
rest—there ain’t no hurry. They can’t hold the funeral without YOU.”
Stones were a bother to me. Even the smallest ones gave me a panic when
I went over them. I could hit any kind of a stone, no matter how small,
if I tried to miss it; and of course at first I couldn’t help trying to
do that. It is but natural. It is part of the ass that is put in us
all, for some inscrutable reason.
I was at the end of my course, at last, and it was necessary for me to
round to. This is not a pleasant thing, when you undertake it for the
first time on your own responsibility, and neither is it likely to
succeed. Your confidence oozes away, you fill steadily up with nameless
apprehensions, every fiber of you is tense with a watchful strain, you
start a cautious and gradual curve, but your squirmy nerves are all
full of electric anxieties, so the curve is quickly demoralized into a
jerky and perilous zigzag; then suddenly the nickel-clad horse takes
the bit in its mouth and goes slanting for the curbstone, defying all
prayers and all your powers to change its mind—your heart stands still,
your breath hangs fire, your legs forget to work, straight on you go,
and there are but a couple of feet between you and the curb now. And
now is the desperate moment, the last chance to save yourself; of
course all your instructions fly out of your head, and you whirl your
wheel AWAY from the curb instead of TOWARD it, and so you go sprawling
on that granite-bound inhospitable shore. That was my luck; that was my
experience. I dragged myself out from under the indestructible bicycle
and sat down on the curb to examine.
I started on the return trip. It was now that I saw a farmer’s wagon
poking along down toward me, loaded with cabbages. If I needed anything
to perfect the precariousness of my steering, it was just that. The
farmer was occupying the middle of the road with his wagon, leaving
barely fourteen or fifteen yards of space on either side. I couldn’t
shout at him—a beginner can’t shout; if he opens his mouth he is gone;
he must keep all his attention on his business. But in this grisly
emergency, the boy came to the rescue, and for once I had to be
grateful to him. He kept a sharp lookout on the swiftly varying
impulses and inspirations of my bicycle, and shouted to the man
accordingly:
“To the left! Turn to the left, or this jackass ’ll run over you!” The
man started to do it. “No, to the right, to the right! Hold on! THAT
won’t do!—to the left!—to the right!—to the LEFT—right! left—ri—Stay
where you ARE, or you’re a goner!”
And just then I caught the off horse in the starboard and went down in
a pile. I said, “Hang it! Couldn’t you SEE I was coming?”
“Yes, I see you was coming, but I couldn’t tell which WAY you was
coming. Nobody could—now, _could _they? You couldn’t yourself—now,
_could_ you? So what could _I_ do?”
There was something in that, and so I had the magnanimity to say so. I
said I was no doubt as much to blame as he was.
Within the next five days I achieved so much progress that the boy
couldn’t keep up with me. He had to go back to his gate-post, and
content himself with watching me fall at long range.
There was a row of low stepping-stones across one end of the street, a
measured yard apart. Even after I got so I could steer pretty fairly I
was so afraid of those stones that I always hit them. They gave me the
worst falls I ever got in that street, except those which I got from
dogs. I have seen it stated that no expert is quick enough to run over
a dog; that a dog is always able to skip out of his way. I think that
that may be true: but I think that the reason he couldn’t run over the
dog was because he was trying to. I did not try to run over any dog.
But I ran over every dog that came along. I think it makes a great deal
of difference. If you try to run over the dog he knows how to
calculate, but if you are trying to miss him he does not know how to
calculate, and is liable to jump the wrong way every time. It was
always so in my experience. Even when I could not hit a wagon I could
hit a dog that came to see me practice. They all liked to see me
practice, and they all came, for there was very little going on in our
neighborhood to entertain a dog. It took time to learn to miss a dog,
but I achieved even that.
I can steer as well as I want to, now, and I will catch that boy out
one of these days and run over HIM if he doesn’t reform.
Get a bicycle. You will not regret it, if you live.